GoCardless

Pros: Very low fees. Much better than credit cards!
Integration with Xero is excellent.
Handles multi-currency as well.

Cons: Getting multi-currency setup correctly in Xero took a few extra steps and wasn't documented clearly at the time (we had to setup an additional clearing account in Xero). But the GoCardless support was very useful, and guided me to the Xero documentation I needed to follow.

Overall: A really useful product, and solves the problem of wanting automatic payments, but not wanting to lose 3% of revenue to credit card charges!

Pros: I have been using GoCardless for my business since 2012. When we first started using them they were a small start-up and we had remained loyal and supportive of them for over 7 years.

Cons: Sadly their service today is nothing like it was in the past. Over the years there have been some issues with their service but they had generally been helpful in getting things fixed.

Overall: However, they service today is absolutely shocking and I would urge anyone considering using the company to be extremely careful.

It recently came to our attention that GoCardless had implemented something on their customer sign-up forms for customers to state that their bank account required multiple signatories.

Hundreds of our customers had either mistakenly chosen this option or they had become aware of a loophole with the GoCardless payment system.

It transpired that selecting the 'multiple signatory option' meant GoCardless were supposed to request additional information from customers prior to being able to collect payments.

However, in our case, GoCardless incorrectly informed us that they were able to take payments even though the customers had not completed the additional process required by GoCardless.

Consequently GoCardless kept informing us that payments had been collected when this was not the case. Hundreds of our customers were able to enjoy using our service without paying us anything due to the GoCardless error.

The issue caused us a loss of over £22,000. We brought the flaw to the attention of GoCardless who admitted the issue but have refused to compensate us or apologise for this serious error.

This is what they told us:

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Following a further review of this issue with our Product team, we have discovered that we did experience a bug in the dual signatory process for mandates created before January 2018. When payers completed the online authorisation page via the redirect flow before January 2018, we sent an email to the administrator email on your account that stated that you would be able to collect payments from them.

In fact, this was not the case, as the payer still needed to complete the dual authorisation step of their mandate setup. The issue was limited to one automated email with unclear messaging that stated the mandate was active and ready to have payments collected through it, where in fact it was still awaiting a second customer signature via the dual signature authorisation form before becoming active. Consequently, payments were, perhaps unknowingly, being created against mandates that were not yet able to have funds collected through them.
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We have stopped offering GoCardless as a payment option on new subscriptions and have very sadly had to instruct our lawyers to take action to recover our losses.